The Same old Skinny Kids From High School
by TarynWanderer
Summary: Knives Chau battles the Nega-Knives  book verse .


**Warnings**: drugs  
**Disclaimer**: not my characters

* * *

Knives Chau opened her mouth and said she loved him, and the force of her love was so strong it almost knocked Scott over. In hindsight, she thinks, maybe a smarter girl would have known the extent of her power in that moment. But she didn't realize she had power like this – she thought her love was something to give away, so in return the recipient could make her worthwhile.

Scott didn't do that. He cringed away from her love and brushed it off his shoulders and cast her aside.

It took her almost a year to realize Scott had some _serious issues_. It took her a few more years to realize she had always been worthwhile.

* * *

Knives Chau is standing in some thick woods near a campground on Bowen Island. She is crouched in a lightly defensive stance, her sai out and ready. She is wearing rather expensive boots (she agreed to a basement apartment to keep up her clothes habit) and a plaid faux fur-lined vest in the morning wetness. She has been up all night, and is still a little bit high. In the shadows _she _peers back at her, hiding behind trees, a big-eyed little simpleton, young and weak and chronically unhip.

Ever since the night she ended whatever-that-was with Young Neil, fighting in the corner of a crowded, charged Ghostkeeper gig, Knives had been avoiding Nega-Knives.

* * *

Knives went to McGill right after high school. She enrolled in a business degree, which was her parents' choice, but she hated all the classes and spent most of her time at gigs. Montreal was similar to Toronto, if a little exotic. The same muggy, brutally hot summers and long, cold unliveable winters. She mostly hung out with Anglos, didn't get a job, and didn't learn a word of French. She took all the lessons she learned from Scott and lived them all out again, like she hadn't learned anything at all.

She fell in love with a boy named Christian (pronounced the stuffiest way possible). He was nominally a Concordia Student, but said he was _really _in a band. She lost her virginity on a mattress on the floor at a party, and there was nothing to regret about it. They had a fun few months, but then Nega Knives returned (Knives thought she had left her in Toronto). _She_, this unsexy, ghostly little nerd, this weak little thing, got closer and closer to her, and Knives wound up like Pre-Scott Era Knives, wide-eyed and open hearted, and Christian couldn't handle the force of her love. When her love knocked him to the ground he picked himself back up, brushed it off his shoulders, and cast Knives aside.

* * *

So two years in Montreal didn't work out for Knives Chau. It wasn't _just _Christian, that would be pathetic, and when she said hello to Kim on Facebook she could hear it in Kim's voice – "that is _pathetic_!" with an incredulous eyebrow raise and sharp, unwavering side-eye.

She went to Vancouver. She compromised with her parents and took an entertainment and business management course. She liked the weather. She liked the slow-moving, Pacific-scented, almost complete anonymity. (Montreal was full of Torontonians, but here there were only Calgarians.)

Knives took this as a clean slate. She would truly leave Nega Knives behind this time, no longer see her lurking in snowy alleyways or see a glint of her weepy face in the corner of the mirror. She would bottle up her love, and put up her shields, and never be the vulnerable one again. She wasn't interested in fighting a series of ex-girlfriends for some guy's impossible-to-keep love anyway.

She did well in her course, and moved away from campus, in with a Filipina girl who introduced her to cocaine. Lots of cocaine. Secret parties in old art school parking garages and slum hotel bars, which is where all the best bands started out in this town. And so many boys, anonymous boys she told herself she wouldn't remember in a week, although she always did. The sex was rarely good, but the drugs helped.

It all kept Nega Knives off her back, anyway. And Knives got exactly what she wanted – she was tough, and _cool_, and nobody cast her aside anymore. She was exactly like the girls she had wanted to be. She was exactly like Envy.

Sort of.

Sometimes she found herself missing Nega Knives. She'd be doing her makeup and she'd suddenly miss the days when she didn't, she'd be colouring her hair and she'd suddenly miss the days before she'd ever dare. She'd miss the times when she wasn't playing a game. She missed those first few days when she had just met Scott, before she knew about exes or baggage or secrets or lying. Before he taught her how to be horrible. She sometimes got attached to a boy, felt stupid for getting attached, and wondered if something was seriously wrong with her.

* * *

Nobody can avoid fighting the Nega Ninja forever, and that is a lesson from Scott she should've learned the first time.

She goes camping with some friends on Bowen Island. She is almost 21 years old. Her friends give her ecstasy. In the startling clearness of those first heady hours she can see herself, and everyone around her, exactly as they are – and Nega Knives, clearer than before, never far from her, a little wounded child-sized version of herself, begging for her love.

She's rusty with her sai. The only school was in North Vancouver, which was just too far to bother with on a weekly basis. She is sober now, and her jaw is tight, and she never wanted to deal with this again.

"Leave me alone you fat cow!" she screams at Nega Knives, and she feels a flash against the back of her eyes, like she has thrown the words at herself, and they cut as deep as they would if anyone else had said them. Blindly, she lunges forward and takes a swing, but Nega Knives has a way of slipping away from her, watery, airy, some kind of effluent coming out of Knives.

Knives spins and tucks, twirling her sai and throwing another jab that would've disabled another girl – a girl who wasn't her father's daughter, trained for years and accustomed to weekly fights. She throws too hard and knocks into a tree. She's not used to fighting outside, so far from the city, from shelters and things to climb. She's never climbed a tree before.

She's tired, and thirsty, and out of her element. It's not long before she is lying on her back struggling for breath, and Nega Knives comes over – her ghostly little face soft and hurt and _so fucking vulnerable_. Knives doesn't want her inside, but doesn't try to push her away. She's been pushing her away for years now, ever since she started cutting her hair like Kim and dressing like Envy and hating the guts of a girl she didn't even know.

Nega Knives flops down on top of her and poofs out of existence. Knives reabsorbs her, a piece of herself that was broken off and came back. She lies in the wet grass and writhes a little, feeling the bits of her memories and herself slide back into place, all the times she was hurt that she tried to forget, all the parts of herself she decided were unlovable and cast aside.

It's surprisingly quick, and it doesn't really hurt, except that it _hurts_. This is what it feels like, to be knocked over by the force of Knives Chau's love.

* * *

Her friend Agatha finds her crying by herself in the woods and takes her back to the camp, cuddling with her under sleeping bags and giving her tea, worried sick that this is somehow all her own fault, which is something Agatha does a lot. Knives opens her mouth and everything pours out, a whole slew of stories that would be nonsense to Agatha. But with each story she tells, Knives gets a piece of herself back, a piece from everybody she unleashed her love upon only to have it cast aside, a piece for every time she put up her shields and pretending to be someone else. And eventually it all makes sense.

"I deserve better than this, Agatha," Knives says, although "_this_" is still a rather undefined concept in the verbal part of her brain.

Agatha nods, of course, and in her own little ongoing battle, makes "_this_" all about herself.

* * *

Knives will enjoy the last year of college and the year after that, which she'll spend working different jobs and travelling up and down the West Coast. She'll still hook up with boys occasionally, though she'll be pickier. She will genuinely like each one, but she'll keep the bulk of her love for herself, nestled deep down with that sweet, guileless little girl from Toronto.

Knives will finish school with a decent grade, though still not that much closer to knowing what to do for a living. She'll eventually get involved with a summer rock camp for little girls. She'll take the concept back to Toronto, and one day she'll be riding the bus. A boy, about 19, with immigrant parents and a space in a college he doesn't really want, will drop his books at her feet and she'll help him pick them up. They'll smile at each other, and she'll know right away that he likes her.

But now she'll agree with him.


End file.
